Building Trust In Afghanistan

Goodwill Ambassador

A Langley Air Force Base sergeant learns that giving to war torn children can be its own reward.

The job is a strange one for an Air Force guy who called Langley home until April.

Master Sgt. Edgardo Onas hands out beans and bullets to squads of military police who accompany convoys from Bagram Air Base in the high desert of eastern Afghanistan.

Caves near their routes have housed remnants of al-Qaida and Taliban forces the U.S. has fought for more than three years now.

"You can't help wonder: Are all of them going to come back?" he muses.

Then Onas, 37, went out with a convoy a week ago, 45 minutes to the Afghan village of Kharoti.

He volunteered. He had to. The mission was to take nearly 63,000 pounds of clothes, toys and school supplies to children ages 5 to 8, and Onas is a sucker for kids.

He has one, Anthony, 15, at Denbigh High School.

Behind the children in Kharoti, near the village's sandstone walls, men with AK-47 rifles walked around menacingly. Between them and 50 people from the Air Force's 455th Expeditionary Wing, soldiers stood guard, fingers on triggers.

It was unnerving.

"You go outside the base to the village, and one of the oddest things about the work is looking over your shoulder," Onas says. "'Who is that? Who's doing what?' You read in the paper about soldiers in Iraq being under fire when they go to villages."

Supposedly, he was ready for trouble.

It's also odd for Onas to wear armor while handing a composition book and colored pencils to a little girl, then telling her sister not to touch the M-16 slung across his back.

But fear is pushed aside by little faces looking up, boys with bright eyes, some under multicolored caps, and girls with smiles, many framed by woolen scarves.

Kids get the clothes, toys and school supplies. Onas gets the reward.

"Oh, the kids, the kids," he gushes. "You should see the kids. They were so happy. The kids didn't want to go home."

They are poor, and Kharoti is a village from another time. It's eight miles of hard walking to any place that offers shopping, and there is little money to buy even life's necessities.

"We gave them clothes," he says. "They like Western clothes."

The trip was part of a program the U.S. military calls Adopt-a-Village. The first step involves dealing with a village elder, because nobody is going to talk without getting his blessing. Then soldiers and airmen load up trucks to work on the children in hopes that they can do better than their parents have at forging peace.

"I can tell you I was thinking they could be my kids," Onas says by phone from Qatar, where he is on R&R. "I thought, 'That child could be my child. They're in the situation they're in, and they didn't do anything to start it.' ''

As much as anything for Onas, it breaks up the monotony. He has yet to hear a shot fired in anger, and gazing at snow-capped mountains only takes him so far.

"I read where a guy answered a question about what surprised him most about Afghanistan," said Onas. "He said, 'That I would be fighting a war in such a pretty place.' That's it for me, too."

And seeing happy children is a reminder of home.

"I'm a member of the Peninsula Junior Chamber of Commerce," he says. "It's something we do all the time."

In that, Swee Hart, also a Jaycee, understands. Like many in the organization, Hart, who works at the Virginia Air and Space Museum, has gotten e-mail from Onas.

"I know that he likes working with kids and that it's one thing he has missed by being overseas," she says.